Assessment has always played an important role in counseling. This book provides information about the various psychological assessment procedures that are relevant for practicing counselors. The text deals with the use of tests that are most often employed by counselors and it includes case studies. Its purpose is to help counselors become better…

The implementation of the Dallas (Texas) Public Schools 1995-96 Title I PK-2 reading and language arts portfolio entailed monitoring and data collection to determine the student outcomes and the technical quality of the instrument. A total of 2,001 portfolios were reviewed for prekindergarten through grade 2. The components were generally in place…

The predictive power of the Split-Half version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised (WISC-R) Object Assembly (OA) subtest was compared to that of the full administration of the OA subtest. A cohort of 218 male and 49 female adolescent offenders detained in a Texas juvenile detention facility between 1990 and 1992 was used. The…

Most training programs in education and psychology focus on classical test theory techniques for assessing score dependability. This paper discusses generalizability theory and explores its concepts using a small heuristic data set. Generalizability theory subsumes and extends classical test score theory. It is able to estimate the magnitude of…

"Pickleball" is a new racquet sport which is one of the fastest growing educational activities in the Northwest. This paper describes the development of a test battery designed to measure students' pickleball skills for purposes of classification; to determine improvement of playing skills; and to aid in grading of individual…

A "Fundamentals of Speech Communication" course is required of all college students, and upon completion of such a course students should possess those basic speaking and listening skills necessary to complete successfully their college educations. With a view toward developing a new, more effective listening test, a study examined…

The development and validation of a scale to assess English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' perceived self-efficacy are described. Self-efficacy expectations are beliefs about one's ability to perform a given task successfully. Research on self-efficacy and related concepts is reviewed, noting their significant role in predictor human…

Despite its supposed importance, children's emergent interest in literacy has been seldom studied. As a result, no easy-to-use and psychometrically sound measure of children's emergent interest in literacy exists. This study made an initial attempt at validating such a measure. On three separate occasions, 24 parents and their 2- to 3-year-old…

The effects of two different approaches to training community nurses in patient self-care were evaluated. In an intensive workshop, 36 nurses were trained, and 19 of them received further personal guidance 11 times during a 6-month period. Their performance was assessed before the educational intervention, after the workshop, and after the…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on assessing the learning organization. "Measuring Organizational Learning: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of an Organization Survey" (Jamie Callahan Fabian, Ralph O. Mueller, Dail L. Fields) compares two models for measuring four constructs inherent to Schwandt's model of…

Three descriptive statistics (difficulty, discrimination, and reliability) of multiple-choice (MC) test items were compared to those of a new (1980s) format of machine-scored questions. The new method, answer-bank multi-digit testing (MDT), uses alphabetized lists of up to 1,000 alternatives and approximates the completion style of assessment…

This report describes a methodology for increasing the validity and reliability of inferences made about the problem-solving ability of science students that is based on performance on different kinds of tests. The generalizable cognitive components of problem solving that might be targeted by assessment are described, and specifications are…

Instructions for the administration of the Opinions about Deaf People Scale are given. This scale measures the beliefs of hearing adults about the capabilities of deaf adults. The somewhat ambiguous title of the instrument is designed to avoid leading respondents to respond in socially desirable ways. The instrument is based on misconceptions…

The Student Descriptor Scale (SDS) was developed as a validation measure to determine whether students described and counted by states as "severely handicapped" were, indeed, students with severe disabilities. The SDS addresses nine characteristics: intellectual disability, health impairment, need for toileting assistance, upper torso motor…

This paper reports the results of using a three-layer backpropagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Two network structures were developed, one with and one without a sigmoid function in the output processing unit. The data set, which consisted of a table of coded test items and corresponding…